Germany Seeks to Hold Militants Over 1970s Murder

`We have decided to apply to use coercive detention,` prosecutor Rainer Griessbaum told a news conference in Karlsruhe.

German authorities said on Friday they will seek to detain four former members of the militant Red Army Faction (RAF) until they give information linked to the murder of a top prosecutor in the 1970s.

Murdered prosecutor Siegfried Buback was one of the most prominent victims of the militant leftist group which carried out a decades-long campaign of kidnappings and killings that still haunts the country.

"We have decided to apply to use coercive detention," prosecutor Rainer Griessbaum told a news conference in Karlsruhe.

Ex-RAF members Brigitte Mohnhaupt, Knut Folkerts, Guenter Sonnenburg and Christian Klar are expected to be pressed for more information, Greissbaum said.

The four have served lengthy prison terms for the murder, although authorities have never been able to pin down who fired the fatal shots because the group refused to talk. All apart from Klar have been released from jail.

Also known as the "Baader-Meinhof Gang" after founders Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, the RAF is suspected of killing 34 people between 1970 and 1991. It disbanded in 1998.

Buback was ambushed in his car in Karlsruhe on April 7, 1977 by two men on a motorcycle, who then fled to a getaway car driven by a third RAF guerrilla.

The Buback case came back to trouble authorities earlier this year, when a former RAF member alleged that Folkerts had been wrongly convicted of shooting the prosecutor.

The case was reopened after suggestions authorities may have withheld information in pursuing the convictions decades ago.